Part 1: Inclusion, Diversity, and Gender Theory

The social science literature on how gender differences affect policy processes and outcomes—and how policymakers can see through a gender lens to improve outcomes from peace negotiations to counterterrorism—is steadily growing. But those insights are not being applied to American security policy-making. Our research found that policymakers have little or no knowledge of gender theory, lack exposure to research on gender-differentiated policy impacts, and simply do not factor in gender when shaping policies. Strikingly, we found no progress over the results of our original study two years ago.

In fact, respondents—regardless of political leaning and gender—said, “it’s not something people talk about.”

“I mean, look,” a male respondent said. “It doesn’t come up in a lot of policy conversations, rightly or wrongly. ‘What’s the effect of this policy on women?’ It doesn’t get asked. People would react strangely to it, frankly. Maybe that’s something that needs to be assessed, maybe it is a good question to be asked and why, or maybe it’s not. People would look at others sideways—it’s not part of regular discourse.”

Unlike 2016, respondents often added an almost apologetic caveat, or recognition that failure to think about gender was an oversight.

When the 14 participants were asked to list various factors that go into policymaking and implementation, none volunteered gender. However, when pressed, five—two men, three women; one Republican, one Democrat and one Independent—did say yes, it’s a factor. Men were more inclined to say no, even when probed, as were Republicans. Two women said the question of having women at the table is the only way gender comes into play.

The five who did see gender as a factor in policymaking had an important commonality: experience working at the United Nations.

The paradox of the UN’s role came up repeatedly in this study. At the UN, and in many countries’ national security establishments (as well as at NATO), gender inclusion and gender’s influence on policy outcomes have taken on heightened importance in recent years. “Taking gender questions into account when planning an operation could be just as important as considering the weather or the geography,” the Swedish Armed Forces Chief of Operations Jan Thörnqvist said in 2016. “All of that can make an operation more effective.”

We also asked policymakers and influencers about the theory of gender mainstreaming that inspired UN Resolution 1325 (2000), which urges inclusive representation in security efforts, stresses the importance of including women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, and has created an entire subfield of study and implementation.

“It doesn’t come up in a lot of policy conversations, rightly or wrongly. ‘What’s the effect of this policy on women?’ It doesn’t get asked.”

Gender mainstreaming “dilutes the important”

The concept at the core of the UN work is “gender mainstreaming”—the idea that considerations of gender, both who is at the table and how policies affect people of different genders, belong in the policymaking mainstream. Only two of the 14 participants could define the phrase, both of the men who had spent time at the UN. Only one of 12 participants correctly defined the phrase in 2016.

Moreover, the majority, upon hearing the term, did not respond positively. Some suggested that “mainstream dilutes the important,” potentially pushing gender down the priority list.

Others perceived mainstreaming to involve singling women out for special or different treatment. One respondent went as far as to say, “I’m delighted to say I do not know [what gender mainstreaming is]. The idea that you could make a policy’s impact on a society without all people on society, that seems insane.”

Gender considerations have made more inroads in international development, health, and the so-called “soft” side of foreign policy. In 2016, study participants differentiated between “hard” and “soft” security issues, assuming that gender came up on the “soft” side more frequently. This year, however, almost no participants mentioned the hard-vs-soft dichotomy. One woman mentioned when Syria sanctions were being formulated at the National Security Council in 2011 as a case study of how gender does, or does not, factor into national security policymaking. I “don’t want to do an easy one, like poverty or water issues…” she said, before landing on the Syria example.

“How these policies could affect women never came up,” she said. “And you had people of every office there to brainstorm and come up with options and implications. I remember a woman coming in from the UN Women’s office and mentioning several times how we need to ensure women were safe and asking how schools would be affected. It wasn’t weird when I was inside government that we didn’t talk about gender, but it’s weird to think about now. If all comms go down, we didn’t think about the effect on women and schools. That got lumped under UN efforts. For all the UN’s flaws, they’re better at including impacts of policies on women. Funny, considering it’s such a bad place to work as a woman.”

“I’m delighted to say I do not know [what gender mainstreaming is.] The idea that you could make a policy’s impact on a society without all people on society, that seems insane.”

Gender as a synonym for women

The very concept of gender—the state of identifying as male, female, or nonbinary based on social and cultural constructs—is a heated battlefield in polarized U.S. cultural wars. That debate has not soaked through to the national security establishment. None of our interview subjects, from either side of the aisle, took issue with the term “gender.” Obama-era officials spoke with pride about the progress they had made “baking gender into the process.” “I see the progress in the statements coming out [of the] NSC and UN resolutions,” said one. “Gender is increasingly in the lexicon. I don’t know if that ball has been progressing over the last couple years, though. In the past, the U.S. has been the one pushing the agenda, so if current policymakers are not putting emphasis on it, it can erode.”

This same individual asserted that “there will always be a gender office at the UN because you can point to all these resolutions where there’s a section on gender and you can’t argue for closing the office.”

His confidence seemed to reflect a broader acceptance. No one offered support for the reported intent of the Trump administration’s initiative to replace the construct of “gender” with one of biological, determined-at-birth sex, including reported efforts to remove gender from UN documents, most often replacing it with “women.”

Indeed, however, many of our interviewees did treat gender as a synonym for women. Social science and advocacy efforts to stress that gendered lenses uncover particular needs and concerns of all people, not just women, do not seem to be taking root in policymaking. Significant opportunities to improve policy are likely being lost as a result. For example, young men’s inability to achieve the markers of successful manhood seems to be a significant driver of extremist group recruitment. The use of rape as a weapon, a threat and a tool of indoctrination against men or LGBTQ+ individuals, is also a significant feature of some conflicts.

“Women, peace, and security” remains unfamiliar and evokes hostility

Awareness or understanding of the UN initiative’s tagline phrase “women, peace, and security,” or WPS, had only grown slightly over the last two years. Four respondents (two men and two women) knew what the initiative was—as compared to only two women two years ago. These individuals mentioned both UN Resolution 1325 and the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017, which codified the UN’s goal of increasing women’s participation in security and peacebuilding into U.S. law, but provided no new resources for its implementation. One man commented on what he saw as the tenuous nature of the project by remarking that he couldn’t define WPS without using the word “tried”—as in, “tried to codify the protection of women in conflict zones.”

Policymakers had an implicit expectation that not every administration might be equally committed to gender concerns, and sought to address this by putting priorities into law:

“Legislation can be such a helpful tool, especially on the back half of an administration. We worked really hard with the Hill to get legislation through, not knowing who would be coming in next. Without that, it may have been lost if it weren’t legislation.”

Another policymaker felt that the machinery of government was making progress in sustaining a focus on gender, saying:

“Increasingly, with capital letters, those words have become not a given, but a sure path to sustainability in women. It’s important to advocate for the role of women and empower them in conflicts, as well as post-conflict. Formalizing it within the multilateral framework—baking it into our process of peacekeeping, but also [into] how USAID engages in post-conflict societies.”

As we found two years ago, most respondents worried that the phrase implied some kind of gender segregation, or even “dangerously [siloing] women off from peace and security.” This year, a woman who did know the phrase commented, “It makes it sound like something that’s not as well-integrated into actual peace and security. You shouldn’t have to call it out. You call it out because people aren’t doing a good enough job pulling it into consideration, but it shouldn’t have to be called out.”

The phrase brought up challenging and negative connotations for those familiar with it and especially for those encountering it for the first time, who interpreted it as an essentialist view of distinctly female roles or qualities related to peacemaking and peacekeeping.

In addition, female respondents tended to default to the idea that the primary gender challenge in the security field was protecting women in conflict—although UNSC 1325 was written, and has been implemented, to focus as much or more on extending agency to, not just protection of, women. Female respondents defaulted to a focus on keeping women safe even as they feared it automatically implies they are the weaker sex.

“Passing measures to protect women in conflict zones does more harm than good,” said one woman. “It’s important to recognize women may be impacted differently than men by a policy and that is fair game. But when it remains as vague as ‘protect women,’ we’re doing women a disservice.”

In 2016, a significant number of participants offered traditional stereotypes about gender roles and “soft” versus “hard” security in their thinking about what women had to offer in the national security space. We heard less of that this year, with participants across gender and ideological lines speaking much more frequently about the need for women in both peacemaking and peacekeeping roles. This year, male respondents shared—as a positive—how “useful” and “empathetic” women are in the field. Asked where women have roles, a majority answered through a geographical lens, often exclusively.

“Maybe in some circumstances in AfPak, you’d want a man instead of a woman; some cases you’d want a woman versus a man,” one male respondent said. “Given backgrounds and cultures, sometimes a woman can get more information. Or, in places like Saudi [Arabia], you can’t send a woman in the room.”

Women, rather than focus on how specific, gender-based traits prepare them for specific roles, offered illustrations of how women reframe roadblocks, such as access or cultural norms, to get things done. They offered a range of ideas on how women professionals add value, including both competence-based and cultural arguments.

One woman traveled to the Middle East with Condoleezza Rice after she left office to meet with political leaders. There, “Condi and I would be able meet with the wives of the heads of state. [They] basically predicted the Arab Spring and said what all the moms were doing about it.”

“Condi and I would be able meet with the wives of the heads of state. [They] basically predicted the Arab Spring and said what all the moms were doing about it.”

Another described a meeting in the Gulf:

“Women often notice if no other women are in a meeting and will act on that observation to find the women and get their side of the story, whereas a man may not even notice. And you better believe if the women are not allowed in the meeting, there’s a strong likelihood they have a very different side of the story.”

“Women are the ones we wanted to empower in Afghanistan,” one woman said. “They were almost the litmus test. ‘How are the women doing?,’ we’d ask.”

Another echoed this sentiment, explaining that “the women in Afghan villages were much more willing to speak truth and report the rapes.”

The idea that women respond to different kinds of outreach is not new in the international development and health policy spheres, but it showed up in our security-focused conversations for the first time this year. To encourage more women’s participation in a recent African nation’s election, both in voting and working at the polling sites, a woman described how her team “targeted and made sure we thought about the role women played in election work. For example, we gave soap powder to women (it came from Iran so we had to get permission around sanctions), because women are caregivers and that’s important role they play.” This tactic was less a reflection on women’s skills and more an acknowledgement that in that environment, “women play so many different roles, including nurturers.” Therefore, she argued, “often it’s women in the communities we need to engage with. We should be doing more engagement through conversation.”

While some respondents focused heavily on women’s abilities, others made arguments about women’s supposedly inherent characteristics, a view that social science calls “essentialism.” They suggested that women are more concerned with peace than men because they tend to be nurturing, protective mothers and sisters: “The people with the most stake in peace are the women,” one woman said. “They want to protect their children, they don’t want sons to have to fight.”

Across agencies and administrations, nearly all our interviewees saw most roadblocks to gender inclusivity emanating from one of two sources: the Department of Defense, or from interagency rivalries.

As one DoD policymaker put it: “The military tends to say, we’re not the diplomatic branch of the U.S. government, we’re the fighting branch. We solve problems by fighting.”

While the defense community was broadly perceived as the lead roadblock, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) was frequently cited specifically as the first to raise gender in the policymaking process. This difference is visible in the strategic plans initiated for each department by the Trump administration. The State Department makes 18 mentions of “women” and nine of “gender” in its 62-page report. The Defense Department’s for FY 2018-2022 makes no mention of “women” or “gender” in its 38-page report. Four mentions of gender in the 78-page appendix, however, reference a harassment survey. As of October 2018, the USAID page on performance.gov features only Lorem Ipsum filler content.

Respondents also pointed to the outsized role of the National Security Council, which has steadily accumulated policymaking power at Cabinet departments’ defense. In addition, there is a perception that attention to gender needs to be commanded from the heights, rather than bubble up from below. As a result, the role of interagency coordination, and what does or doesn’t get coordinated, becomes important in a way traditional policymaking theories don’t account for. “If the USG mandates us to focus on [gender] more in policymaking, we’ll focus on it more,” one person said. “Politely, I don't think anyone in the military is going to take orders from UN.”

A senior-level policymaker at the NSC shared a 2009 anecdote in which gender played a surprising role in policymaking:

“With any broad development/diplomacy/defense packages we deploy and implement overseas, we have to report to Congress. On Afghanistan policies, there was competition between the White House and State. [State] wrote this report but it was missing any element of gender and female empowerment, which was a very important piece to the new Afghanistan policy—central really. It was about going beyond the numbers to focus on the empowerment of women. The joke is that women will chair the the Commission on Women’s Issues. They want to look beyond it and focus on healthcare and education and other things. We pushed back on State about the report and said it has to include gender. Clinton got upset we’d sent the report back to State and came over to meet with General [James L.] Jones. Once we all discussed the issue, everyone realized they’d let the rivalry get in the way of the policy.”

As UN Resolution 1325 marked its 18th anniversary this October, one respondent weighed in on where we are now versus where we’ve come. “I can’t say empowering women is not an element in current foreign policy, it was just bigger in the Obama days,” he said. “It was ‘not, not one’ in the Bush days. That’s not fair, it was more than ‘not-not.’ It was starting to bubble up then.”

Another, with experience in the current and previous two administrations, was quick to warn of the potential for fallacious comparisons of gender importance in policymaking across administrations or ideologies. “I don’t see any evidence that the Republican establishment doesn’t take gender into consideration in policy discussions,” adding that “there are exceptions to the rule in every administration.”

“I don’t see any evidence that the Republican establishment doesn’t take gender into consideration in policy discussions.”

The 2016 study found that policymakers lacked exposure to research on gender-differentiated policy impacts across the board and struggled to connect gender perspectives with policy outcomes. In 2018, two of the 14 we interviewed spoke in detail about gender-differentiated impacts, and another three acknowledged they did not know what they were, but were certain such measurements existed.

While interagency policymakers and influencers are more aware of measurement data’s existence and its value, they remained unaware of what could be measured or how to find such data and metrics.

However, we found a far less fatalistic view of the potential usefulness of gender-differentiated impact data than in 2016. Impact data is still far from commonplace and hard to find, but nearly all respondents welcomed the idea of it rather than discuss the roadblocks and challenges to such measurements.

“There’ve been gradual improvements on how to measure impacts in peacekeeping,” one respondent said. “Go back to Bosnia [in the ‘90s], it may have come up, but it wasn’t really talked about. In the late 2000s, you knew you needed to measure it but didn’t know how to do it.”

For example, “the easy metric might be how much polling staff are women? We may have that 50 percent metric, which is better than nothing, but we don’t have anything deeper about what roles they played, what influence they had, how it impacted elections, etc.”

Common sources cited when respondents were pushed to think about where they might go to find such metrics included the UN, USAID, and the State Department, as well as think tanks, although no specific ones were named. The problem most commonly-cited with gender-differentiated data was that “it’s varied and not consistent.” This mirrors what we learned in 2016. However, this year, there was more openness to such metrics, rather than simply citing the barriers and difficulties.

While there’s massive room for gender-differentiated outcome measurement improvements across the board in USG, the military and defense communities face the strongest cultural barriers, according to many in this study.

“We still have a long way to go with military, even with the younger generation,” one person said. “There’s such a culture there that has to be overcome.”

“There’s a bit of aversion to talking about these types of issues. Everyone in the military is a bit sensitive right now,” one participant with military and defense experience said. “If you’re the commanding officer, the fastest way to get into trouble is to have issues with sexual harassment or inclusivity; measuring those sorts of things, commands try to avoid it if they don’t have known issues. Which is probably why I’ve never heard of anything like [gender-differentiated outcomes] being measured before.”

“We still have a long way to go with military, even with the younger generation. There’s such a culture there that has to be overcome.”

Another echoed this culture of sensitivity and fear and added a more institutional barrier. “Units rotate in and out. [A] new unit comes in, so it’s hard to institutionalize the learnings that have come over time. Especially when people don’t want to talk about controversial topics in the office.”

Policymakers and influencers we interviewed spoke of wanting to be convinced by the data, but acknowledged how anecdotal evidence becomes a powerful tool. One person said:

“The most persuasive arguments are data-driven. But what can get it on policymakers’ radar is the data paired with the personal stories. In developing worlds, there’s an increasing body of proof: What has and will sway or motivate people in policy society is if you can show data on qualitative improvements in economic growth, as well as the human stories benefitting from those improvements.”